The volume of readily available information related to any field continues to grow, and the rate of growth is accelerating. The capacities to organize and index this information have not kept pace, however. It has consequently become more likely that information precisely responsive to any need exists, while it has become less likely that anyone needing that responsive information will be able to find it.
The legal field has long and acute experience with these problems. Increased resort to the courts to address questions of public policy has had the consequence of increasing the volume of precedent that must be assimilated. The growth of the regulatory state has meant an increase in the number of regulations and administrative rulings. And the consequences of overlooking any applicable legal authority can be dire.
Before the coming of the personal computer, legal practitioners developed elaborate systems for organizing, indexing, and retrieving information. Among the elements of such systems are headnotes, which are annotations that state the major points of a judicial opinion; digests, which organize by subject headnotes collected from many opinions; and citators, which index the citations between documents. Headnotes, digests, and citators remain in wide use.
As in other fields, legal practitioners have applied computers and computer networks to the problems in managing information. Databases of legal information, containing, e.g., opinions, headnotes, digests, and other secondary material are available through networks of computers.